St. Chrysostomos the New on the Old Calendar Movement

There was a time in the past when almost the entire body of the Hierarchy in the Byzantine State was lured into the heresy of the accursed Arius, along with the citizenry of Byzantium, at which time the Orthodox character of the official Church was represented by a small faction of Orthodox in Constantinople not tainted by the corruption of Arianism.

This faction remained under the pastorship of St. Gregory the Theologian, who, in the Chapel of St. Anastasia, through sermons redolent with the pleasing and divine aroma of Orthodoxy, hurled thunderbolts against the cacodox and soul-destroying heresy of Arianism. St. Gregory the Theologian and his party not only did not constitute their own Church in severing ecclesiastical communion with the Arianizing Hierarchy, but also served thenceforth as a pledge for the return of the whole Church to the realm of Orthodoxy through a rejection of the heresy and abominable cacodoxy of Arianism. Hence, given that the spirit of Orthodoxy, and not externals and numbers, forms the substance of the Church, it is self-evident that we constitute and represent the age-old and anti-innovationist Church of Greece, as continuators of her ancestral traditions and Orthodox ordinances, and not the innovating Hierarchs, whose focus is on externals and numbers.

- St. Chrysostomos the New, Confessor and Hierarch (+1955)

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